University of Vienna in 1905 led to close personal ties with members
of the reigning Habsburg family.
Because of his exceptional geographical and linguistic knowledge
as well as his acquaintanceship with ranking figures in the region,
he was recruited at the outbreak of World War I to help coordinate
military and diplomatic efforts on behalf of Germany and Austria.
His special assignment to northern Arabia aimed at reconciling three
feuding princes—Ihn Rashid, Ihn Saud, and Nuri ibn Shaalan—and
gaining their support for Turkey’s war against Great Britain. Despite
an auspicious beginning, the mission fell short of its ultimate aim,
due primarily, in Musil’s opinion, to the “complete indifference of
the tribes toward the holy war and pan-Islamic ideas.” While fre-
quently compared with his British counterpart T. E. Lawrence, Musil
thought Lawrence’s mastery of Arabic was defective and believed
that money rather than charisma had secured Lawrence followers
among the Arabs.
After the war, Musil became a citizen of Czechoslovakia and
resumed his prolific scholarly career at Charles University in Prague.
Even though some objections were raised regarding his Habsburg
connections, the appointment had the endorsement of President
Tomáš Masaryk. Musil left this position in 1938 following the
German occupation of the country and retired to the Moravian coun-
tryside.MYKONOS. The site of a terrorist attack on 17 September 1992
orchestrated by the Iranian government, Mykonos was a Greek res-
taurant in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. After a protracted trial that concluded
on 10 April 1997, a Berlin criminal court found an Iranian, Kazem
Darabi, along with three Palestinian Hezbollah members, guilty of
murdering four Kurdish-Iranian dissidents with automatic weapons.
Also implicated was the head of the Iranian secret service, Ali Fal-
lahiyan, for whom an international arrest warrant was issued. In the
diplomatic crisis that ensued, nearly all the members of the European
Union withdrew their envoys from Tehran for several months. In
2004, the installation of a memorial plaque in front of the restaurant
provoked the objection of Iranian officials. Darabi and his main ac-
complice were released in 2007, despite their original sentences of
life imprisonment. See also MAISON DE FRANCE.
312 • MYKONOS